An eclectic mixture of personal essays, stuff about writing, stuff about books and far out philosophy from an old baggage in a book-tower.

ADHD

Or should it be: I Wish I Were A Wizz? Suspect latter, but grammar purists free to comment/vote. Unlike UK Parliament at the moment. If I was or were a Wizz, I would no doubt be able to sort out what was going on, politically speaking. Or perhaps only a Sorting Hat could do that.

I always had a bit of a thing about wizards. Not witches, for some reason. I saw myself as a bit of a wizard, only I was a green (with stars) robed wizard, not a blue one. Suspect green is more elevated and wonderful than mere blue, in my imagination. Well, if you’re going to have fantasy fantasies, you might as well be the hero.

It’s been a funny old day. I was meant to go to some sort of ‘do’ at the Over 50s, which is now not, technically, the Over 50s but the Tea and Bingo Club, or possibly the Bingo and Tea Club. All ages welcome. As it turns out I didn’t quite make it to the meeting, in the Scouts Hut in the next village, but suspect 99% of the members playing Bingo and drinking tea will still be Over 70, just as they were when they were the Over 50s and met in the pub.

I did try to go, even though I didn’t want to. It was the Christmas one and would have involved purple tinsel, Christmassy paper plates with red and green elves and reindeer on, and Christmassy tablecloths. I know because I helped with the sourcing of these items in one shop after another in town, and the lugging of them around afterwards. And the driving of them home in the boot of my car, and later re-delivery.

I gave myself a good talking to all morning, trying to work up the enthusiasm.

You know you’ve got to go.

It’ll only be a couple of hours – or three, or four… time will soon pass.

It might be fun, you never know. There’s always a first time, in a fun-less lifetime, for something to turn out to be fun.

They might have made special vegetarian sandwiches for you, the only vegetarian. What are they going to do with a mountain vegetarian sandwiches if you wimp out?

And so on, and so forth. And I did set out, honestly. I drove all the way over to the next village, repeating the above backbone-stiffening mantras in the car, and wound my way through the snarled and tiny streets in the hope of a) avoiding loss of wing-mirrors and b) finding a parking space.

And there was a funeral on. Outside the little, scenic, Christmassily decorated church, a horde, a veritable Ghengis Khan’s Army of self-conscious, shoe-polished, black-clad mourners.

I did try the tiny car park outside the Scouts Hut but, as anticipated, it was clogged to the muddy fences with large, shiny mourners’ car, everything double-parked and blocking everything else in. With difficulty, I extracted myself from the car park and, with even more difficulty, got back out onto the village street again without losing a wing mirror or getting dented. Dented already, of course, but that dent was self-inflicted, which is different.

And I did look for an alternative parking space in the narrow village street, honest, but there was nothing I could get into without parallel parking skills or one of those cars that does it all for you.

And so I panicked and came home. Unlike the Prime Minister, I am not Admirably, but Quite Exhaustingly, Limpetishly Resilient. Or it may be that when I see quite clearly that something is not going to work – never, ever going to work – I instantly give up. Make a new plan, Sam. Hop on the Bus, Gus. Don’t need to discuss much… Etc.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

A Einstein

And so I went home, texted

(apparently only old people say texted, everyone else says, ungrammatically ‘text’. I text… the ‘ed’ which would have made it clear that I am not texting right this second but actually text some hours ago – being silent)

my plate-and-tablecloth buying friend and told her the plain truth, that the funeral had prevented me parking. Which she will not believe. Sigh!

And then, as if in retribution, the Jehovah Ladies turned up again – smiling, anxious, warmly wrapped up against the cold. I have written before of the Jehovah Ladies, who like me. I usually manage to deflect them into discussions of cats with three legs, the weather, my-mother-in-the-home (they had it on their secret card index system that she was passed or gone beyond or whatever and I had to correct them on that – still technically alive). This is where being probably ADHD is an advantage – your mind works on digressions and cul-de-sacs. A veritable quagmire, a bottomless pit of irrelevancies and non-sequiturs is at one’s command… Normally, the difficulty is to avoid sinking into it…

So I got my coat on and stepped out into the back garden to have the usual little chat and accept the limp leaflets – two, this time, because they missed me last time. I don’t actually listen to what they say, to be honest, but I value the fact that they care about my soul, and my salvation. No one else does.

A moment of inattention and they had managed to wrangle me back from three-legged cats, vets, mother-in-the-home, weather etc – to tell me that I need not worry. The world appeared to be in a dreadful state but God would step in. God was just waiting for his opportunity to step in and save us all from ourselves. Didn’t I find that comforting? I would find that comforting indeed, if I could only believe it.

Maybe I should try the back-stiffening mantra thing, as above:

God will fish all the plastic out of the sea…

God cares what happens to us stinky old polluting naked apes…

We really don’t deserve to make ourselves extinct, the sooner the better…

And then they told me the story of Adam and Eve, and how Eve ate the apple because the Devil was disguised as a snake. Strangely enough, I knew that. I remarked that people will always feel compelled to do the one thing they are told not to do, it’s like children. And cats.

And then I foolishly remarked that that would be all very well but it said in the Bible that God granted man dominion over all the animals, which was why man felt entitled to eat said animals and perform horrifically cruel experiments on them. They said ah yes, but dominion only means caring for. God instructed us to care for all his creatures, to love them as He loves them. I said I thought dominion didn’t mean that at all.

So they tried me on another word, subjection. They showed me the relevant verses in Genesis, though none of us had our reading glasses on so it was all a bit out of focus. And they said subjection also meant caring for. And I said, to me subjection meant more or less the same as dominion, it meant imposing your will on something or someone weaker than yourself because you felt you had a right to.

But no, apparently subjection also means caring for.

And then I think I managed to non-sequitur them back to cats, and the price of cat food.

I just typed into Google Is ADHD the same as flaky? (should it have an ‘e’? why does it sometimes have an ‘e’ and sometimes not? distracting…) and Google reckons it is, sort of.

To be exact, Google opines that flaky seemingness (to one’s friends, employers etc) is in fact but one symptom of high-functioning ADHD. So whilst one is not technically or actually flaky (or flakey) everybody will always be convinced that one is. Furthermore, flaky-seemingness is but the visible tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to the daily struggle for survival in a world where 99 out of 100 brains are wired the opposite way to your own.

This is depressing, and the thing is, since I retired – or rather, since the world decided it could no longer be bothered to pay me for being bad at various kinds of work I really didn’t want to do – the ADHD, or whatever it is, has got distinctly worse. I used to be able to read, for instance. Spent hours engrossed, rapt, with my nose in some novel or some abstruse metaphysical text, trying to figure out how exactly I seemed to have missed Birmingham and been taken on to Crewe.

Oh Mr Porter, what shall I do?I wanted to go to Birmingham but they’ve taken me on to Crewe.Take me back to London as quickly as you can –Oh Mr Porter what a silly girl I am!

Now I can read for twenty minutes, as long as it’s something lightly-ish and historical and I’m immersed in hot soapy water. My current in-the-bath read, by the way, is The Posy Ring by Catherine Czerkawska. It’s good, even in damp, twenty minute instalments. About antiques seller Daisy Graham who inherits an ancient house on a Hebridean island. She put a little publicity card in with Blanket.

Because, believe it or not, this is the same lady who, under a different name, sold me Blanket the rickety wartime blanket bear (or just possibly sheep) via eBay, and posted him to me in a shoebox from Scotland. I have now knitted Blanket a warming yellowy-browny scarf, by the way, and fastened it with a big yellow kilt pin. I would have posted a photo (as requested when he last appeared) but it is too dark indoors to take one at the moment. I will put it on my To Do list, which I very occasionally manage To Do something from. (Done)

(This is because it’s dark outdoors too, which seems to happen at intervals.)

The trouble is, you spend your life trying to appear not-flaky. Today, for instance, I agonised for several hours before texting a friend to say that I would not be able to come on a coach trip to Southend because I wasn’t feeling too well. The thing is, I am not feeling too well, so it’s a perfectly genuine excuse, this time. But I know she does not believe me. And if I were her I would not believe me either. But what do you do? The constant battle against flaky-seemingness results in a lifetime of ghastly events sat through with gritted teeth or perspiring brow. Boredom or pain, and no escape in either case because to flake out would be viewed as… flaky. Or flakey.

I think I reached some sort tipping point today. I realised I have to stop trying to explain myself, otherwise I am in for an Old Age as dire and dull as my Youth and Middle Age have been. Well, Bog It, I think, I just want to do what I want. Or at least not continually have to be doing what I don’t want.

And finally… another quote, this time from author Claudia Carroll, writing in an old Woman’s Weekly Godmother passed on to me on Friday:

When you’re in your 20s and 30s, life gives you things, if you’re very lucky. Love, a partner, maybe even kids. But you hit good old middle age, and that’s pretty much when life starts taking things away from you…

A cheering thought there, from Claudia.

It set me thinking, what Life did actually give me in my 20s and 30s. Certainly not children. It took away my husband and gave me a lover who was nice while he lasted, though he didn’t last very long. It gave me wrinkles round my eyes… and violent toothache… or was that in my forties?

But I suppose it did give me a few things. A giant(ish) healthy body inherited from my father, which has served me faithfully till recently. Now not quite so faithfully, but it’s doing it’s best, poor thing. Nineteen cats. I do believe the nineteen cats are my equivalent of the nine lives cats are supposed to have. Every time I lose a cat I lose one of my lives. Conversely, of course, every time I gain a cat I gain a life, but that can’t go on. Moggie Gathering Must Stop. And it’s given me a sister who, if not quite as flaky-seeming as me, is getting there. Or maybe equally as flaky-seeming, but a kind of variant. Same reason (backwards brain wiring) but different manifestation. However, it means that she understands me, and I understand her, and so we can love each other, which is a blessing indeed.

To begin, I will tell you a tiny story. It is probably of no significance but it will keep returning to me.

Many, many years ago, for some reason, I was in a small car being driven along the sea front at Hastings – I’m fairly sure it was Hastings and not Brighton or Bexhill (immaterial, but I seem to have to mention it anyway).

My father was doing the driving. There was someone else sitting in the passenger seat beside him and my mother and I were in the back seat. As we sped along we passed a small blue wrought-iron gate, which seemed to serve no purpose, set into the long, concrete expanse of the sea front. And in those few seconds I recorded that this seemingly useless piece of street furniture was in the shape of a breaking wave, and knew that it was that shape because we were at the seaside. And had moved on, just as the car moved on, to some other reverie.

My mother remarked, ‘That was an odd-shaped gate’.

I said, ‘No – it was a breaking wave.’

My mother said, ‘How on earth did you notice that?’

And I thought, but fortunately did not say, ‘How on earth did you not notice it?’

Because stuff like that zooms in on me all the time. It’s like I have to notice all the irrelevant details of a landscape: Hunter’s Mind, as they sometimes, mercifully, call it. I’ve been researching (intermittently and inefficiently, of course) the ‘inattentive’ variant of ADD and wondering if this is what I’ve got. I’ve sure as hell got something. I don’t suppose I will ever know because who cares if someone my age has ‘got it’? By my age it’s too late. Any life you might have had has been well and truly buried under a heap of distractions, sudden passions, fading interests, forgotten-ness…

Everything, important or unimportant, descends instantly into a kind of memory mulch and – with the occasional exception like the sea-wave gate – cannot be retrieved. But which will retrieve themselves, when and if they see fit. Oh no, they haven’t gone, all those useful facts – how many years ago did I move here? what was my postcode in 1987? did I ever get vaccinated against German Measles? what year was my father born? – all the practical details other people seem to recall without effort – they are just hiding. Determinedly.

I have had so few people in my life – maybe three and a half (the half being Ex, and reliant on alcohol) that I could very occasionally allow myself talk the way my brain works, without the Sensible Filters applied. I learned, somewhere around the age of four, that for all of my life I would need to translate everything I actually thought into what I used to think of as a child as Brownspeak, or people would kind of… snigger.

In this blog it’s a mixture – a Curate’s Egg, as they used to say, somewhere around Dickens’ time or maybe – no – earlier – maybe around Goldsmith’s unreadable The Vicar of Wakefield.

Some posts, when I am arguing a point, I tend to try to ‘craft’ a bit. It’s not that I can’t do that. It’s just that I mostly can’t be arsed to do it, because it’s dull. But if you publish and be damned, leaving holes in your argument, people will inevitably home in on them, because the holes are the bits that interest them. The holes, to me, are the bits I wouldn’t have wasted precious time filling in, if I was just being me.

Other posts, like the rare (as hens’ teeth – I love that phrase) short story I will also polish – but this time, because the editing and the story-writing all form part of one indivisible process. This, I suppose, is the famous hyper-focus phenomenon. Writing is the only thing that that it kicks in for, for me. Cannot leave it alone until both aspects are right. Stuck at the computer, sometimes for day on end (hyperbole) because – not right, not right, not quite right yet…

But in most posts I do this sort of thing. I allow myself to ramble, soar, snooze, wake up, find myself talking to the fairies on some bleak hillside where the sedge is appropriately withering and no birds sing, or materialise back at the computer screen with frozen feet, a longing for caffeine and the thing half written, chuckling or aghast at what – somebody, anyway – seems to have just typed up there.

And now I think, would I have given it up – Brain Art, as one girl in the comments section of an ADD website described it when asked to list any positives of ADD – for the chance to have lived a normal life? That phrase jumped out at me – Brain Art – and I knew exactly what she meant. Although if you type it into Google now she seems to have disappeared, that girl in the comments section. All you get are lurid pictures of actual, physical brains with their branching neuronal systems lit up in various arty, rainbow-coloured ways. Quite jolly, but not something I would want on my living room wall whilst consuming Oeufs en Cocotte, Pigs in Blankets or whatever.

What would it have been like without a lifetime of pencilled and computerised Plans, none of which I could ever find the impetus, or manage to remember for long enough, to put into effect? What would it have been like to be able to make a decent living and not have to be constantly, constantly frightened? What would it have been like, not to have the funny looks, not to be odd – to have been a Brown person and lived in that Brown world where wave-like gates did not leap out at you, where you did not notice the patterns between the branches of trees rather than the branches themselves and realise that stately dance against the sky, for the tree in itself, was Art?

What would it be like not to get bored with and leave, or get fired from (usually both) nearly everywhere I worked? Wouldn’t it have been worth it to be able to store something I wanted to say, or do, or remember, in my head for more than a few seconds before a new thought or seven came rushing in to crowd it out?

What would it have been like not to be permanently Away With The Fairies – or rather never to know at what moment the Fairies would choose to reclaim me, and then release me?

To sacrifice those few seconds of joy, just every now and again; that occasional swooping flight of felicity; that unexpected, almost shocking burst of laughter when an image or series of images I somehow, accidentally managed to articulate hit home with my ‘audience’ – images I had just been somehow given?

To lose that feeling when a post suddenly makes sense, then the beginning suddenly bites the tail of the ending, and then connections branch out in all directions, between this post and other posts, between now and then. To never again discover, as if reading it for the first time, some small thing I must have been thinking all these years?

What would it have been like, to exchange my bewildering, endless, swooping inner landscape for a decent-sized back garden with a crazy-paving path up the middle and a selection of well-tended roses? Would it have been worth it, the chance of life – a proper, real, safe, contented, prosperous, happily married and gainfully employed life – in exchange for handing back my wings?